rubber spatula: friend or foe?

With the Kid close by every second of every moment while I’m cooking, she always chimes in with “Can I have a taste help?”

Which, translated from kidtalk, usually means “Move over, Rover. I want to eat that batter. And eat it NOW.”

And how do we protect the bowl and get the batter out of the pan? Our fingers. No, The Spatula. They’re so helpful, aren’t they? Bending into every crack to get the last bit of batter or dough. Nothing goes to waste with a spatula on the scene. It’s really great, isn’t it? You want to hug the guy who came up with these, don’t you? What did we do before these were invented?

I’ll tell you what: we got to lick the bowl.

Yes, we used a clunky, ill-shaped, old wooden spoon that banged against the sides of the bowl when you even tried to get all the batter out, leaving airport-runway wide swaths of gooey goodness to snarf down merrily while that other stuff for other, less fortunate people was in the oven.

As a former teenage cookie dough maker/eater (Back in da day, you had to make the dough, people. You could not buy it pre-made.), I can understand the Kid’s knee-jerk, overwhelmingly loud and sorrowful reaction when I pull out a spatula now to get the muffin batter into the pan: